Using this type of strategy to capture your Uplifter data into your accounting package allows you to capture your full invoice revenue at the time of member registration and then offset the entire revenue amount by posting the balance to a generic receivables account. As you complete each bank deposit, you then reduce your generic receivables account to clear the balances. This method provides you with summarized visibility of your revenues and receivables in your accounting package while your specific member data and accounts are still stored and tracked in Uplifter.
To use this method, you will need to ensure that in your accounting package you have identified:
- A series of revenue accounts that you will use to define the revenue categories for your club
- A receivables account that you will use to offset any revenues recorded
- An account that represents your bank account(s) into which you enter bank deposits
- Optionally, if your club collects any sales tax, the tax accounts that your Uplifter registration invoices will collect
Using this method, you will want to ensure that you work with various account periods that make sense with your club and determine across your team that has access to your data what those periods are. After a certain period has elapsed, you will want to enforce that certain elements are not updated in Uplifter that may affect your revenue reporting. For other tips, check our article Uplifter Accounting Best Practices.
STEP 1: Record Your Revenues & Receivables
On a regular basis, you would pull a Revenue Summary report (based on the type of revenue categorization you would like to capture in your accounting package). The most accurate revenue summaries will be determined by filtering date ranges for “Invoice Line Item Created After” and “Invoice Line Item Created Before”.
All of these revenue amounts would be recorded as a credit to your according revenue accounts. If you collect tax, you will need to record the taxes collected for these amounts. This is typically a credit to these accounts. You would then record a debit to a generic receivables account to offset all amounts.
STEP 2: Reconcile Your Bank Deposits and Offset Your Receivables
As with cash-based accounting, you will need to ensure that you are reconciling your bank deposits regularly. For further details, please see How to Reconcile Your Payments Against a Bank Deposit.
For each bank deposit that you reconcile, you can add single journal entry that would debit your bank account to include the deposit and a credit to your assigned generic receivables account.
Tips & Pointers for this method
- Always ensure that all your invoices balance
- Stay on top of recording your payments in Uplifter
- Store spreadsheets of exported payment reports to track which transactions have been reconciled within your bank deposits
- Once you have recorded your revenues for any given invoice line item in your accounting package, be sure that you do not update that invoice line without making according adjustments to your accounting program
- You can use reports like your Financial - Aged Receivables report to see if your receivables account in your accounting package balances against the amounts you see outstanding in Uplifter
- You can use the same periodic revenue summary report that you use to capture your revenues, but pull the report from the very beginning of your fiscal year to see if the balances match with your accounting packages chart of accounts balance and make adjusting entries as required